For instance, 'clothes' would be asked, and Ammar, after inquiring if white clothes were meant, or blue, or black, or red, and being answered 'any clothes,' would give a list of garments of various shapes.
'Age' was a question that caused a great awkwardness, I am sorry to say.
'Well,' answered Ammar, 'it might be anything—seven, fifteen, seventy—anything!'
After the greatest invention and planning on our part, we unhappily thought to put the question in this form:
'How do you say "What is your age?"'
'My age,' said Ammar, 'mine—well'—with evident annoyance and great hesitation—'I'm thirty-five—not old—not old at all.'
He is really quite fifty.
On such occasions there had to be a tremendous conversation with the bystanders.
Theodore Bent Making the Vocabulary at Fereghet